10-20-10

It has really been hard here in Harlem since my trainer left Elder Craig and I to fend for ourselves on the streets of one of the most close minded areas in the world. Harlem has a church on the corner of every block and that makes it really hard to help people see that Christ true church has been restored. Most people have a pretty strong faith in Christ which is really really good but they don't understand that they don't have a fulness of truth or the authority to do the things to be saved in the kingdom God. Even though its hard we are keeping a postive attitude and having a hope for better days. Ronnell has a job now and he is not meeting with us very often because his job takes up a lot of his time. We are trying to help him realize how much he needs the gospel in his life and that he needs to be baptized soon. He is doing better then all the other investigators that we had, all of them have pretty much dropped off of the face of the earth.
A pretty cool experience that happened yesterday is when we were going to look up a less active lady. So we were walking up the road that she lived on and we were walking next to this lady. I decided I was going to contact her and see if she was interested in learning about the church. Well she was very nice and knew what we were doing but she wasn't interested in hearing about it. So I just did what I normally do and just kept talking to her so atleast she could have a postive influence with the church. As we talked she finally revealed to us that she was baptized into the LDS church when she was 14 years old, along with her mother. I was so excited when I heard this that I told her that
"We are your welcome home party!!!! WOOOOO!!" and totally invited her to come back to church and we would love to see her, then I asked her name and she told us. Her name sounded really familiar and a thought came to mind to look at the look up list that we had, but i ignored this prompting and kept talking to her about the church. She then told us she lived in Queens and so she couldn't come to the ward in Harlem. So we gave her are phone number and told her to call us so we could give her info to the Queens Elders. She said ok and said bye and walked across the street and then i looked at the look up list. Then I realized the lady that we were going to look up was the lady we were talking to just a second ago. So we decided to go see her at her apartment which was right across the street where she walked to. So we got to her door and knocked and a dog started barking, then an eye looked through peep hole and then the dog stopped barking and the apartment went silent. I guess she found it creepy that we showed up to her door right after talking to her on the street, I think she thought we followed her. The moral of the story is to ALWAYS follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost and if you do you will be guided what to do to not make yourself look like a creep.. oh well .... :)
I hope everything is going well back home and I would love to hear from everybody.... I only got one e-mail from my family this week and it was very short.... and only one letter... it was a great letter... Im not complaining....just know.....writing missionaries brings blessings.... :)
Love you all
-Elder Shepherd